Moe Book Examines Privately Funded Vouchers

Privately financed school-voucher programs, which began in the early
1990s as a "charitable experiment in education choice," have grown into
a national movement, a Stanford University political scientist
concludes in a new book.

Low-income parents who enroll their children in those programs are
very satisfied with the schools they choose, the book says. Moreover,
parents appear to be choosing private schools for the right reasons,
citing educational quality as their primary criterion.

The book, titled Private Vouchers, is edited by Terry M. Moe, a
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace
at the university in Stanford, Calif. Mr. Moe brought national
attention to the school-choice issue in 1990 with Politics, Markets,
and America's Schools, a book he wrote with Brookings Institution
scholar John E. Chubb.

Mr. Moe said his new book sheds some fresh light on the hotly
debated question of whether giving parents more choice of schools for
their children can improve schools in the long run.

While headlines have focused on publicly financed efforts like the
Milwaukee program that gives poor parents vouchers to pay for private
schools, an entire crop of privately supported programs has sprouted
across the country. All of these programs are geared to poor families,
and most of them have been launched since 1991.

Mr. Moe says that foundations have created 17 private-school-voucher
programs serving a total of 6,500 children.

In his book, which is published by the Hoover Institution Press, he
has collected evaluations of four of the largest: Partners Advancing
Values in Education (PAVE) in Milwaukee; the Children's Educational
Opportunity (CEO) Foundation in San Antonio; Indianapolis' Educational
Choice Charitable Trust, otherwise known as the Golden Rule program;
and the long-established Student-Sponsor Program in New York City.

What the studies found was that, given the opportunity, low-income
parents responded enthusiastically to private-school-voucher programs,
according to Mr. Moe. In all of the programs studied, demand for the
vouchers far exceeded availability. And yet, all the program
participants found slots in private schools, contrary to predictions
that they would be turned away.

Overwhelmingly, parents in the programs also said they were highly
satisfied with their children's new schools.

"I think it's what you should expect with vouchers," Mr. Moe said.
"When you let people choose, they're happier."

Drawbacks and Concerns

On the downside, the studies, like others before them, also suggest
that choice programs could have a potential skimming effect, creaming
off the most advantaged of the disadvantaged.

In three of the four programs, the parents who took part were much
better educated than other low-income parents with children in public
schools, and they tended to have higher expectations for their
children. In San Antonio, for example, 55 percent of the mothers in the
program had at least some college education, whereas only 19 percent of
the public school mothers had that much schooling.

"The way to deal with this is to design programs properly," Mr. Moe
said. Some of the programs, he pointed out, advertised their
availability through private schools and churches and accepted
applicants on a first-come, first-served basis. "Obviously, the way to
do it is to do everything you can to get the word out," he said.

The book offers limited data on the key question of whether
participating in a school-choice program can improve student
achievement. In Milwaukee's PAVE program, students outperformed both
low-income public school students and students in Milwaukee's publicly
funded choice program on a standardized test of mathematics and
reading. At least in the first year of operation, though, nearly half
the students who came to the program had already been enrolled in
private schools. Also, students in the New York program had higher
Scholastic Assessment Test scores than their public school
counterparts.

"If vouchers are going to have an effect on achievement, that will
be borne out over a longer period of time," Mr. Moe said. "I think
parental satisfaction is a very good measure of what's going on out
there now."

Like Mr. Moe's first book, Private Vouchers has drawn both praise
and criticism.

"This puts on the table a lot of evidence about programs we've known
nothing about," said Bruce Fuller, who, with his colleagues Richard
Elmore and Gary Orfield at the Harvard University graduate school of
education, published a more critical collection of studies on choice
programs last year. (See Education Week, Nov. 8, 1995.)

"I think Terry has shown a lot of intellectual honesty by
recognizing that these programs can have grossly unequal effects," Mr.
Fuller said.

But Mr. Fuller also faulted some of the student-achievement analyses
for failing to account for students' prior academic achievement.

"The other concern I have," he added, "is how do you ever go to
scale with these things? Will the private sector show the commitment to
sustain these experiments?"

Vol. 15, Issue 33

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